I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.
Mate, kWh is a measure of electricity volume, like gallons is to liquid. Also, 100 watt hours would be a much more sensical way to say the same thing. What you’ve said in the title is like saying your server uses 1 gallon of water. It’s meaningless without a unit of time. Watts is a measure of current flow (pun intended), similar to a measurement like gallons per minute.
For example, if your server uses 100 watts for an hour it has used 100 watt hours of electricity. If your server uses 100 watts for 100 hours it has used 10000 watts of electricity, aka 10kwh.
My NAS uses about 60 watts at idle, and near 100w when it’s working on something. I use an old laptop for a plex server, it probably uses like 50 watts at idle and like 150 or 200 when streaming a 4k movie, I haven’t checked tbh. I did just acquire a BEEFY network switch that’s going to use 120 watts 24/7 though, so that’ll hurt the pocket book for sure. Soon all of my servers should be in the same place, with that network switch, so I’ll know exactly how much power it’s using.
Between 50W (idle) and 140W (max load). Most of the time it is about 60W.
So about 1.5kWh per day, or 45kWh per month. I pay 0,22€ per kWh (France, 100% renewable energy) so about 9-10€ per month.
17W for an N100 system with 4 HDD’s
I think at max 200w? It runs a collection of fedi/self service stuff.
I also run a pi with a couple of apps on a pi 3 that sips power.
It’s a legitimate issue because it’s 50+ cents per killowat hour where I live so power is very expensive…
Holy shit. I’m paying less than 10c per kwh even in the “high usage” tier.
I wish that was ours…
My 10 year old ITX NAS build with 4 HDDs used 40W at idle. Just upgraded to an Aoostart WTR Pro with the same 4 HDDs, uses 28W at idle. My power bill currently averages around US$0.13/kWh.
My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws… 0.1 kWh… in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
I came here to tell my tiny Raspberry pi 4 consumes ~10 watt, But then after noticing the home server setup of some people and the associated power consumption, I feel like a child in a crowd of adults 😀
I have an old desktop downclocked that pulls ~100W that I’m using as a file server, but I’m working on moving most of my services over to an Intel NUC that pulls ~15W. Nothing wrong with being power efficient.
I’m using an old laptop with the lid closed. Uses 10w.
All in, including my router, switches, modem, laptop, and NAS, I’m using 50watts +/- 5.
It does everything I need, and I feel like that’s pretty efficient.
Quite the opposite. Look at what they need to get a fraction of what you do.
Or use the old quote, “they’re compensating for small pp”
With everything on, 100W but I don’t have my NAS on all the time and in that case I pull only 13W since my server is a laptop
80-100 watts at idle which is most of the time. Two OS drives, two fast drives, two spinners, lots of networking and always syncing with the rest of the cluster.
50W-ish idle? Ryzen 1700, 2 HDDs, and a GTX 750ti. My next upgrade will hopefully cut this in half.
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I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack
That doesn’t seem right; that’s only ~18W. Each one of those systems alone will exceed that at idle running 24/7. I’d expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
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after a week of runtime it told me 2.5kwh average. could be average per hour
If it gives you kWh as a measure for power, you should toss it because it’s obviously made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
The PC I’m using as a little NAS usually draws around 75 watt. My jellyfin and general home server draws about 50 watt while idle but can jump up to 150 watt. Most of the components are very old. I know I could get the power usage down significantly by using newer components, but not sure if the electricity use outweighs the cost of sending them to the landfill and creating demand for more newer components to be manufactured.
Pulling around 200W on average.
- 100W for the server. Xeon E3-1231v3 with 8 spinning disks + HBA, couple of sata SSD’s
- ~80W for the unifi PoE 48 Pro switch. Most of this is PoE power for half a dozen cameras, downstream switches and AP’s, and a couple of raspberry pi’s
- ~20W for protectli vault running Opnsense
- Total usage measured via Eaton UPS
- Subsidised during the day with solar power (Enphase)
- Tracked in home assistant
80-110W
Is there a (Linux) command I can run to check my power consumption?
Get a Kill-a-Watt meter.
Or smart sockets. I got multiple of them (ZigBee ones), they are precise enough for most uses.
If you have a laptop/something that runs off a battery,
upowerIf you have a server with out-of-band/lights-out management such as iDRAC (Dell), iLO (HPe), IPMI (generic, Supermicro, and others) or equivalent, those can measure the server’s power draw at both PSUs and total.






